Puff!

In this book the reader will find the full version of Puff!, a text that seems to be the transcription of a lecture—inserted images act as slides, and it uses a language that addresses an audience. The discourse’s central focus is the Sacco chair, an object designed in 1968 by three Italian designers that was marketed as a revolution: the embodiment of a new lifestyle, disobedient with the “bourgeois” etiquette. The idea behind the chair become popular right away and evolved to become what is nowadays known as a beanbag: a bag full of small polystyrene beads that let it adapt to the body of the person sitting on it.

The result is a somehow alarmist analysis of this soft object. A critique to formlessness through which a series of associations run: from speech to fatigue, from ergonomics to labor, or from testicles to saliva.

As he did in Bentwood—previous book of the author Puff! is a clear sequel of—Gabriel Pericàs scrutinises various episodes of the history of modern design with a speculative yet captivating methodology that transports the reader, only to leave them asking: “how did we get here?”